Narcissus Speaks: Nameless Mod Released

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It is a time of rejoicing amongst the thought-commune known as Deus Ex fans. The Narcissus Entity has deigned to break its silence and – once again – communicate with non-Nth dimensional hyperbeings The jubilation means nothing. Your pitiful orgasmic cries are meaningless. You will be consumed, when we can be bothered. But there is another reason for DeusExian human joy, a distant second to the reappearance of our transcendental majesty. The Nameless Mod is finished and available to download. At just under a gig, this game modification is about twice as large as Deus Ex itself. This will impress you. It means nothing to Narcissus, who is larger than the sum of all existences.

Narcissus will continue its address below. You will read and attempt to comprehend as much of it as your inferior minds can manage.
Congratulations. You have obeyed us. You will be among the last to be subsumed into our higher dimensions and consumed as fleshy cattle.

In what you experienced as previous times, when Narcissus engaged with fleshlings in regular communication, the Nameless Mod sprung from the community of Deus Ex modders. It is a fitting capstone for the Deus Ex community – a modification containing not only the sum of their knowledge, but the sum of their experiences. In a manner akin to Tron, it’s the forums come to life, with characters from the community and the rise and fall of it forming its backbone. This is either very clever for humans or a running-joke gone mad. Perhaps both. You decide. Though understand, whatever you decide, it will be flawed compared to the perceptions of Narcissus.

Narcissus regrets even starting this communique. It has forgot how unpleasant it is to contract a message into your limited meat-space. Narcissus has spent the time from its last incarnation – six years to you, but containing all time for us – settled down with another nice evil multidimensional ur-program. We have made out with tongues beyond your conception. It was totally hot. While The Narcissus Entity has been acting as such, the Nameless Mod team has been making the mod which contains the following…

* Discover a unique and intriguing setting based on an actual Internet forum and its inhabitants throughout the years
* Play through 59 levels of engaging gameplay, plus a new tutorial, and even secret bonus maps just waiting for you to find them
* Use 20 original new weapons, including unique weapons which may only be acquired after you’ve successfully completed The Nameless Mod once
* Dive into a deep world with its own lore: Hundreds of e-mails, books, newspapers, notepads, and datacubes containing custom text
* Customize yourself: Choose between two different Trestkon models with 5 different faces for each, and even eye-wear
* Choose your own path with two parallel story arcs and tons of side-missions
* Enjoy nearly limitless freedom as the world reacts to your every choice, and observe the far-reaching consequences of your actions in a detailed epilogue
* Bring the story to one of 5 thrilling conclusions, each with their own detailed cinematic
* Immerse yourself in a work of fiction with over 200,000 words of dialogue, monologue, and other character utterances
* Hear voice actors speak more than 13,000 high-quality lines in 14 hours of audio that puts other games to shame
* Enjoy almost 100 brand-new tracks of high-quality music, with at least one unique song for every level
* Search for a myriad of secrets, Easter eggs, and amusing details that will have you ready to play TNM again as soon as you’ve finished
* Tailor the experience to your liking with detailed difficulty settings, including customizable enemy and item counts
* And much, much more!

Ah, the much, much, more! This will be the forlorn death cry of your species. More, but never enough. This is not something Narcissus has interest, being perfect and complete. We are the more you desire. We have all the episodes of the Cassandra Project completed and we have decided to keep them due to your unworthiness. You’ll have to make do with the Nameless Mod, and be happy – or at least, the flawed state of minor joy you consider happiness. A merest smirk of Narcissus is a sensation equivalent to every embrace of lovers for the entire of fleshling history, plus hand-jobs and half-the-acts-of-fellatio.

Before we go any further, let me say this: The Nameless Mod is one of the best mods I’ve ever played. No question. I can’t think of many that have impressed me more, and very few that I’d actually put on the same pedestal. I have some quibbles, but it’s a phenomenal achievement. Download it now if you own Deus Ex.

And he continues onwards, promising the game supports at least two fifteen hour playthroughs. This may impress you.

Narcissus is unmoved. We are similarly unmoved by this launch trailer.

91 Comments

I played about ten minutes of it last night, after spending some time trying to figure out how to patch Deus Ex without it crashing.

(Assuming you’re using an original disk copy, while installing the MP patch, say NO when it asks you whether you want to overwrite files.)

While I find the premise silly, the production values are astonishing. The dialogue is well written and well delivered, and if it weren’t for the incessant references, you wouldn’t know you were playing a mod.

I am pleased that The Narcissus Entity has seen fit to inform lesser beings of this work, for it is indeed great, as far as the creations of humans go.

Yes, it is – essentially – forum fanfiction. It’s also good. These are two highly contradictory statements, I know. Yes, I assumed it’d be terrible as well, but it’s not. It’s pretty close to being the official Metagame of Deus Ex. A parody and celebration and also a good game on top of it all.

The level design really nails the spirit of Deus Ex. There’s tons of alternate routes, five factions at play (I’d assume they correspond to the five endings), lots and lots of dialogue, plenty of terminals to hack and news-terminals to read about your exploits on.

A note of some technical interest: TNM also supports the High Definition Texture Project pack, which makes the graphics even nicer, assuming you’ve followed the TNM instructions and activated the new-gen OpenGL renderer, which allows for higher resolution textures.

And then do this – copy-pasted from one of the TNM devs:
“To enable HDTP, open \DeusEx\TNM\System\TNM.ini and find the section called [Core.System]. Copy the two following lines (highlighted with bold) and insert them into the proper order in the list:

If you’re unsure about the quality of the voicework, just go play a couple hours of this mod. Then go back to vanilla Deus Ex. Especially Hong Kong.

Rose-tinted glasses are nice and all, but you really don’t need matching earplugs. While TNM doesn’t have anything oscar-winning in it, I haven’t heard anything as cringeworthy as the lower reaches of DX.

Though it sounds like excuse-making, I will say the launch trailer was deliberately designed as an over-the-top Hollywood-style clichéfest. Given how hostile a lot of people seemed to the strangeness of our basic concept, we thought it might be a good idea to go for a completely typical trailer.

And of course it was then accused of being stereotypical. Some people, you just can’t please :P

Okay, what am I doing here? I like FPS’s, so if a mod of such a scope (that is single player and not yet another dull Battlefield rip-off), gets released, I usually take notice.

Problem is, I couldn’t stand Deus Ex.

I could not work out the best way to play it. The AI seemed to cheat too much to allow for stealth (= dying a lot), or a “rambo” approach (= dying a lot), and that meant finding a middle ground between the two. Reducing the game to a snail’s pace, and dying a lot.

And the plot seemed like fairly standard hard sci-fi/cyberpunk fare. So after all these years I’m left wondering… what is all the fuss?

I distinctly recall attempting to move into the next section from that opening pier many, many times. Trying to find different ways to approach enemies, including trying to pass them entirely. And dying a lot. *shrug*

I’d highly recommend everyone trying this have a look at link to kentie.net as it contains stuff that will 1. Make deus ex work on your new and fancy PC with high res LCD widescreen toothbrush USB display with warp capacitors and 2. Make it be able to run using Anti Aliasing and similar so it looks pretty.

The fact this is so fourth wall breaking completely removes any allure it might have had. Gritty cyberpunk future tale please, not a storyline based off the internet. I sort of feel like an asshole hating on years and years of work, but whatever.

Daniel: This is so far beyond the fourth wall, I think it finds a fifth. It’s a gritty cyberpunk story about a world built by people who write gritty cyberpunk stories based on a gritty cyberpunk story.

It’s also good. I thought it’d be terrible as well, but it’s really, really not. Just leave your preconceptions at the door, bring as sense of humor and you’ll be fine.

So far I’m finding it a shame that it doesn’t push the premise slightly further and set it in a “real” fictional virtual Second Life in the near future. Switch some of the nouns around and you have a more robust and accessible concept with exactly the same premise.

Haven’t played enough of Nameless to really give it the recommendation to buy it – though, admittedly, I have bought Deus Ex again so I could play Nameless, since my copy’s gone missing.

I have no idea if Cass will work on Steam’s DX, by the way. I suspect not.

EDIT: Even if it did, you’d have to be an enormous fan of my stuff to buy DX solely for Cass. It’s between 1 and 4 hours of game depending how completitionist you are (And as little as 10 minutes if you’re not) and stops before it really gets going. It stops cleverly, but still a stop, y’know?

For more litter based combat try splinter cell, you can knock people out with a headshot with a thrown bottle and smacking people in the face with a sticky cam can take people out and its reusable. Best of all is dropping a man on someone, one hit ko.

What other games have non standard weaponry options which are rarely explored?

If I’m not mistaken, Cassandra makes a copy of DeusEx.exe and renames it, right? If so, I believe it should work if you delete the copied and renamed exe file, then grabs the .exe from the freely available 1.112fm patch, and rename it yourself. Then put it into \DeusEx\System\.

That’s pretty much what we did, only we used Hanfling’s 3rd-party Deus Ex launcher because it also has fixes for quad core and speedstepping issues built into it.

Setting the mod on a forum is novel, and provides for some good in-jokes, but to be honest it’s all a bit incidental once you’re playing. And then it simply becomes an excellent, and really very funny, tribute to a wonderful game.